Daniela Tafani @dt@qoto.org

Cory Doctorow @pluralistic mal wieder zu AI:

"But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers.""

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Now, these drivers aren't about to be replaced by AI - but that doesn't mean that AI won't affect their jobs. Commercial drivers are among the most heavily surveilled workers in the country. Amazon's drivers (whom Amazon misclassifies as subcontractors) have their *eyeballs* monitored by AI;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

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And AI monitors the conduct of workers on temp-work apps. If a worker is dispatched to a struck workplace and refuses to cross the picket-line, the AI boss fires you and blacklists you from future jobs for refusing to robo-scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Writing in *The Guardian*, #StevenGreenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

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Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to *help* workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace.

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An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that *reduces* the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers."

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For example, AI is a really good tool for fraud! Rather than paying people to churn out variations on a phishing email, you can get an AI to do it. If the AI writes a bad phishing email, it's OK, since nearly all recipients of even good phishing emails delete them. What's more, no one will fine you or publish an op-ed demanding that your board of directors fire you if you buy an incompetent AI to commit fraud. Fraud is a high-value, low-consequence environment for using AI.

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Another one of those applications is managing precarious workers who don't have labor rights. If the AI unfairly docks your worker's wages, or forces them to work until they injure themselves or others, or decides that their eyeball movements justify firing them, those workers have no recourse. That's the whole point of pretending that your employees are contractors: so you can violate labor law with impunity!

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The pseudoscientific cod-ergonomics of the 1900s was demeaning and even dangerous, but it wasn't *automated*, and if it increased worker output, this was incidental to the real purpose of making workers move like the machine-cogs their bosses reassured themselves they were:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

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But there *is* a way that AI could destroy the human race! The carbon footprint and water consumption associated with training and operating large-scale models are significant contributors to the climate emergency, which threatens the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/

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The "X-risk" of the spicy autocomplete chatbot waking up and using its newfound sentience to turn us all into paperclips is nonsense. Adding words to the plausible sentence generator doesn't turn it into a superintelligence for the same reason that selectively breeding faster horses leads to locomotives:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

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Today's threads (a thread)

Inside: The real AI automation threat to workers; and more!

Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/

#Pluralistic

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"...tech executives envision that, over time, bot teachers will be able to respond to and inspire individual students" - and even that AI could "look at the student’s facial expression and say: ‘Hey, I think you’re a little distracted right now. Let’s get focused'"... https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/11/technology/ai-chatbots-khan-education-tutoring.html?partner=IFTTT

Automated teaching machines are an old dream, constantly recurring in the fantasies of entrepreneurs, but there's little historical or current evidence to support them - the new chatbot-tutors appear more like further privatizing public education through genAI plug-ins

Ecco la registrazione della conferenza di @smaurizi di oggi pomeriggio "Stati di #sorveglianza. Quel che resta di #Snowden" https://bbb-proxy.meet.garr.it/playback/presentation/2.3/597494b24894726ade2970761f05d1595b21cbcf-1704721476607 - sul Big Blue Button del #GARR, naturalmente.

University of #Pisa
#Galileo would be proud

Grazie alla prof. @mcp e Grazie a #DanielaTafani dell'Università di #Pisa e a tutti gli studenti e lettori per questa bella conversazione su #StatiDiSorveglianza: quel che resta di #Snowden

https://bbb-proxy.meet.garr.it/playback/presentation/2.3/597494b24894726ade2970761f05d1595b21cbcf-1704721476607

So true